


Fire From Ember

by Barkour



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Unresolved Tension, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 15:27:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12773943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Sif, brave warrior of Asgard, asks a favor of tricksome Loki. She hopes to save all the worlds. What he hopes for, she cannot know.(AU after The Dark World. Not compliant with Ragnarok.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic after The Dark World and I got about halfway through before life intervened. For personal reasons I've decided to go ahead and post what I got done. As I still have the notes for the whole of it, I aim (or at least hope) to finish it in 2018. 
> 
> Background Jane/Thor.

Again he dropped in on Midgard, as he did once or twice every century and had for the last few, since that first disastrous outing that had led to all this. What the appeal of this tiny world was he could hardly say. Perhaps their ingenuity intrigued him. Their cities changed; they reached out to the stars. The Iron Man’s great-granddaughter oversaw the rise of Midgard’s first truly functional orbital colony, and her daughters saw the second, and the third. In his more laughable moments he thought perhaps he empathized with the human want for more than they had.

Loki dropped by one of the larger way stations out around the system’s seventh planet. When the dealer at the cards table said, “So what bring you here?” he smiled and untucked his coat as he sat down and said, “Boredom, I suppose.”

“Well, you came to the wrong fucking place if you wanna fix that,” said the woman left of the dealer, and the rest of the table laughed. Loki only smiled and undid his cuffs to roll his sleeves up.

“Dressed kinda oldy, aren’t you?”

“It’s a comfort to me,” he said, smoothing his tie, “in my old age,” and that got another round of laughter, laughter echoing oddly off the metal walls and ceiling. Five hundred years and they’d still so little care for aesthetics.

“Poker or ttalt?” asked the dealer.

“Why don’t you pick, old guy?”

The joke, of course, was that to them he looked perhaps five past thirty, with only a few small lines close to his eyes and around his mouth, and his hair cropped tidily so it curled around his ears. He smiled again; they liked it best when you smiled. To the dealer he tipped his head and said, “Please. I’m only a guest.”

“Ttalt,” said the dealer, and three players groaned; one of them said, “I’ll wait out the round.”

Ttalt: that was a new one to Loki. Like all games it was easy to pick up on. He only lidded his eyes and kept a hint of a smile on his face and looked as though he were perhaps trying to think of how best to order his card, and as the rest of the players laughed and swore and threw scraps of paper into the pile, he sent little feeling tendrils at each of them, dipping a toe in his thoughts or her thoughts or their thoughts. He tossed a handful of his own amusing paper money into the pile.

The woman by the dealer looked sidelong at him. She had a great deal of straight, dark hair that she wore pulled back. An old thing moved in his gut when he glanced at her. He wanted to laugh for it, but wouldn’t that have been tricky to explain.

“So where d’you come from?”

“Oh, far from here,” Loki said.

“Going anywhere special?” That was the thin man in the far corner, the one who’d a strong hand of cards and a rough hand for his wife.

“The peculiar thing I’ve found,” said Loki as he rearranged his hand again, “is no matter where you go, few things really change from place to place. The universe is so vast, and yet it’s all the same.”

“Oh, shit,” said the woman with the long dark hair, “he’s a philosopher,” and there was that laughter again, even louder than before; how it resounded all around him.

He smiled graciously, allowing the joke; playing the fool was no new trick for him. The game went on, and Loki’s game continued, too. They had their fun and he had his fun, and in the end their short lives would continue for as long as they would no matter how he played it. The man who beat his wife, Loki pushed at him, little impulses that slipped the man up. He made an over large wager then a bad call, and the strong hand he held fell apart when Loki laid his stronger hand down.

The man swore.

“Beginner’s luck,” said Loki, very sweet. “Another round?”

“I’m in,” said the woman, and the rest of the table agreed, even the player who had waited out the last.

That was how it went that round and the next round. He pushed at them all and pulled now and then; their cards changed in their hands and they didn’t notice because he hadn’t let them. Some of them were guilty, this man of battery, this woman of arson, and some of them weren’t, but he played them all. If a card was in play, it was meant to play, and Loki was finding he was in a mood other than simple boredom. The woman, he thought. The woman with her long hair. She sat with her profile to him, her spotless right cheek always facing him.

After the fifth round, Loki said, “That’s enough play for me.”

“Me too,” said the wife-beater. He’d suffered most.

Loki took his winnings with the dealer’s blessing. He’d a deep pocket on the inside of his coat, and he tucked it all in there as if he meant to do something with it.

The dark-haired woman leaned back in her chair. Her hair tumbled over her shoulder, and she looked at him through her eyelashes. “You hanging around here long?”

He smiled at her. “I’m afraid I must be going,” he said, and he tipped his head to them all on the way out. The money he pulled out from his coat and tipped in a bin halfway down the corridor. He’d no use for it, and clearly they hadn’t either.

*

The rooms he took for the night were lavish beyond use; the money he’d paid for them would prove equally useless when he’d gone. The aft wall was all reinforced glass, or whatever it was the mortals used in place of glass now, and it looked out on a brilliant cascade of stars and there, just beginning to show as the way station continued its slow rotation, the swollen pale blue curve of the seventh planet. He left the lights out. The cosmos was bright enough.

In the starlit darkness he slithered out of his coat and threw it to the mountainous bed near the window. The tie took a bit more work: he got his thumb in the knot and eased it loose, and then he unwound it. The silky fabric hissed, rasping over his thumb. He tossed the tie aside, too. His fingers were on the buttons of his shirt, his gaze still fixed on that cold planet, when he said, “Hello, Sif.”

She made an irritated noise, and he half-smiled at his reflection. In the glass he saw her emerge from the shadows in the expansive kitchen. She’d her chest plate and her winged helm, and glaive and shield strapped to her back, but she was too far back and the light too thin for him to see her face. He didn’t turn but continued unbuttoning his shirt. 

“Have you come to arrest me? I’d dearly like to know on what charges.”

“I haven’t come to arrest you,” she said, in that rich, rounded voice of hers, “though I’m certain I could think of something.”

Her heels clicked on the elaborately tiled floor. The low levels of the station had to put up with metal and more metal; the wealthier levels got stone tiling and wood paneling. Every step she took was a note picked up his spine. Loki shrugged out of his shirt, folded it over his arm, and turned to her.

“You’ve such excellent timing,” he said, “I was only just thinking of you. How long has it been, Sif? Far too long.”

Her dark brow arched gracefully. “You’re the one who keeps track of such things. Not I.”

“Well, I can hardly be expected to keep track of something like that,” said Loki, “not when I’ve so much else on my mind.”

He crossed, shirtless, over to the bed. If he’d looked to the window perhaps he would have seen her reflection, Sif looking to him as he looked to her ghost, but then perhaps he’d see no such thing. Instead he looked to folding his clothes.

“Have you fleeced them all yet?” she asked. 

The timber of her voice—lush, yes, still lush, with that ever present edge to it—filled the vast spaces of these rooms. She sounded much as she had when he’d last seen her, three hundred and forty-eight years ago, though she’d a husk in her throat he didn’t remember. Far from ruining the quality of her speech, this seemed only to enhance it.

“Not all,” he said lightly. He toed his shoes off. The glittering many-colored stone tiles were cool through his stockings. “But I’ve only just started. Ask again tomorrow and perhaps I’ll satisfy you.”

“My satisfaction is of little concern to you.”

“Oh, Sif,” he said, drawing it out and dropping on her name. Loki looked over his shoulder at her. Her face was fiercer, her cheekbones starker; the few delicate lines gathered at the corners of her eyes were like small wings. The intervening centuries had only sharpened her, as a whetstone worked out the flaws in a blade. He smiled.

“Your satisfaction has always been my greatest concern,” he said to her.

She smiled at this, too, so her teeth showed. He wasn’t fool enough to mistake it for pleasure or humor. Some old wyrms, the ones that had lived thousands of years in their tidy little holes with their mounds of gold, showed their teeth before they devoured whatever brave idiot had gone seeking glory. He wondered if she meant to eat him.

Her eyes flicked; she looked him up and down, bare chest and all. “What are you laughing at?”

“It’s of little concern to you,” he said. “Tell me, how is my dear brother doing on the throne? Does the crown weigh heavy on his brow?”

“The Queen sits the throne more often than Thor,” said Sif. The edge took over the husk. He was discovering he wanted to hear that rasp again.

“Jane Foster,” said Loki, thoughtful. “She finds it suits her, does she?”

“Better than some,” said Sif, and he laughed again. She scowled. “And why do you laugh so?”

“For joy for the good of Asgard,” he said. He sat upon the bed’s lip and began working at the stockings. “Oh, I’m very glad for them both. Thor may do battle for Asgard and his lady Jane may read all our books, and Asgard will prosper, and so forth.” He glanced up at her to find Sif looking away from him, back toward the door.

“You needn’t worry for your honor, my lady,” Loki told her. “I’ll leave my trousers on.”

“Leave them on or take them off,” she snapped, turning on him so her long tail of hair flashed, “it means nothing to me.”

He shrugged and began fiddling with the clasp. “Then I shall take them off.”

Sif only raised her chin and fixed him with her gaze, as he’d known she would with her ire raised. The starlight caught on her sharp features, illuminating her as a sun illuminated a moon, and the mole on her cheek showed dark. If he’d thought he’d find amusement in her regard, he’d been wrong. The skin on his back prickled, run over with goosebumps. To strip fully before her seemed suddenly to be too baring a thing. 

“If it isn’t to arrest me,” he said, leaving off his trousers, “and it isn’t to chat, why have you come for me?”

“Asgard has need of you,” said Sif. Her eyes were black and shining, but she no longer looked to him, instead to a spot over his bare, cold shoulder. Starlight played along her long throat.

He rested his hands on the edge of the bed and leaned back, his shoulders bunching. Sif showed nothing.

“I have no need of Asgard,” he said.

“My king has charged me with this quest.”

“Your king.” The word was foul in his mouth.

“My king,” said Sif, “and yours.”

“I am in exile,” Loki said, “so he is no king of mine, only a brother. An estranged brother. Has the queen given him an heir yet?”

“A thief broke into the vault and stole a powerful relic.”

“What concern is that of mine? And may I say, well done of them.”

“The king,” said Sif, “has charged me with retrieving it, and given me leave to ask for the aid of Loki Odinson.”

“Merely Loki,” he said pleasantly. “Neither Odinson nor Laufeyson. If it pleases the king’s champion.”

She would not be distracted. The swell of the nearby planet had inched further into view, and with each fraction the light that ran up Sif paled and grew blue, too, so that she looked a ghost come out of ice.

“In thanks for his aid—”

“‘Your’ aid,” said Loki. “I’m still here.”

“The king will grant Loki a limited pardon,” said Sif, and her lashes flickered, and she was looking at him again. At some point over the last few centuries, she had learned how to hide her thoughts, yet her gaze burned him much as it had ever burned.

“You will be allowed entrance to Asgard,” she continued, “for three months out of the year.”

He said nothing for a moment. His fingers were still, clasping the edge. He breathed easily, without stutter, and so too did his heart carry on beating. Asgard, he thought as he looked up at Sif.

“Well,” he said. “What a generous offer. I must say, I’m tempted. Three whole months? How kind.”

She’d a way of looking at a person that cut through them, that sliced away the fat of prattle and misdirection and got to the meat; that was how she looked at him then, as he made his mocking niceties. The corners of her mouth pinched. Her eyes were lighter now, as the shadows weakened, and still they were dark pools, not limpid but suggestive of things deep in the water he’d be better off not disturbing.

“This is for the good of Asgard,” she said.

A great thing rested between them, a great, old thing born centuries ago, and still it was there.

“What do I care for Asgard?” he asked her. “Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten. There were other things in that vault. Relics that didn’t belong to Asgard.”

“This isn’t one of those things.”

“Not a stolen relic in the vault? But then Asgard sometimes liked to parade its war prizes,” Loki gibed.

Sif’s gaze no longer cut. She looked through him instead, as if she could see the wall behind his head and found its company more compelling than what Loki could offer her. So, he thought. She hadn’t forgotten everything. She might have learned how to keep her intentions from showing on her face but she hadn’t mastered killing the heart.

“What we do for the good of Asgard,” she said to her dear friend the wall, “we do for the good of all.”

Loki laughed. “Do you still believe that?”

She bristled. “I have always believed it,” she said cuttingly, “as I always believe the truth.”

“Your truth is not my truth.”

“You have no truths.”

“No truths you’d care for,” he agreed, “or believe.”

Her jaw tensed. In a moment, she would spin on her heel and go, back out whatever way she’d taken to find him here on this lowly metal satellite. He knew that hard line of her shoulders well, even now. The years had taught her to hide many things, but she hadn’t learned to hide them all. Sif had ever been too honest for such thorough lies. That ponytail of hers bobbed; she turned her head before she turned on her heel.

“Wait,” said Loki, and of all things, she did. She swept her gaze back to him, though now that she had spurned the window and the light it offered, he could see little in her face but shadows.

“Stay,” he said then.

Even without illumination he could see how her brow rose, how her upper lip curled, how her hand at her thigh trembled once and not again. She stiffened; she made to speak—

“There’s a sofa in the first room,” he said before she’d chance to call him ass or a prowling hound or worse. “I’ll consider your offer, generous as it is. But I would sleep first.” When she made no move either for the sofa or the door, he added, “And for the sake of your dear nerves, I’ll leave my trousers on after all.”

“Take them off and burn them for all I care,” Sif said, and that was all the thanks he got. She strode off for the first room and the small sofa there, her steps ringing out like the steady beat of a metal drum.

Loki remained seated there at the foot of the bed, looking not to the stars or the thickening shape of the seventh planet, or after Sif, but rather at the wall across from him, at the place where she’d stood. The scent of oiled leather and that of well-tended metal lingered. Always these had been the perfumes Sif preferred. Light walked incrementally up the wall. The planet’s brightness dwarfed that of the stars, and one by one the stars went out. In the other room, Sif shifted; her armor clinked and leather made soft noise, and he knew she would sleep, if only lightly, for she’d long been sworn to war and in war you found your rest where you could. Or perhaps Sif, like Loki, had no intention of sleeping at all. Somewhere in that thought was a jest, but he’d even less desire to look for it than he had to sleep.

Oiled leather and polished metal. After a time, he watched the sky instead of the wall. He watched the stars. How huge the universe, and most of it dead, empty space and worn-out stars. Little, scurrying creatures wasting their short, scurrying lives on nothing at all. How very amusing, he thought; and that was the joke.

*

Sif had fallen asleep after all, half-tucked onto the too-short sofa. Her legs were propped up before her on the low table, and she’d taken off her helm and set that on the table too, helm and shield and glaive. In sleep, she looked no less grave: the lines at her eyes had eased, true, but the weight of her brow had not and her mouth frowned. Was it a poor dream that did this or his presence? That was a sour thought. True, their last encounter had gone badly. He supposed he should be ecstatic she’d faith enough to lay her collapsed glaive out on the table, near, he noted, to hand. Well, it was faith of a sort.

Loki drew a glove on over his left hand and twisted his wrist, testing the leather. Still stiff—they were newly bought—but the feel on his skin was smooth and the cut fine, and some use would make them better fitted.

“Lights on,” he said mildly. 

The rooms brightened tremendously, and Sif woke with a start. Her hand flew to the glaive; her boots were already off the table. So, that answered that. A snarl pulled at her lips, and then she blinked and she saw Loki kitted out in the light armor he’d taken to wearing some two hundred or so odd years ago. 

“Really, Sif,” he said, “sleeping in? Have you grown soft in Asgard?”

“How long?” she asked. The husk had returned; it thrummed in her throat and rasped in her mouth.

“Three hours.” He tsked and pulled the other glove on, flexing his fingers as he did so. “Lazy.”

She rose from the sofa, rolling her shoulders back and then stretching her arms out. Her heels clicked loudly as she reached for her shield and glaive, and her hair swung, as free as any flag. The leather under armor showed at her side, beneath her chest plate. Loki turned his wrist again.

Sif stood straight again, sliding her glaive in its place at her back. 

“Have you set your mind?”

“As well as I ever do,” he said. “I am but a humble penitent to Asgard’s king.”

“You’ve weapons?” She eyed him.

“You may have your glaive and your fists,” said Loki, tugging at his cuffs as he spoke, “but I’ve always had my wits, and my knives.”

“And your tricks, as well,” said Sif, to which he bowed his head, as if receiving a compliment. When he lifted his eyes again, she was fixed upon him, that tightness pinching at her mouth and eyes again. Her throat shivered. He nearly missed it. There were many ways he could choose to read that, but only one was true, and when her face hardened he’d no illusions.

“If you should turn coat,” she said. The rest she left unspoken; she’d no need to speak it.

He called his long coat from the emptiness, a tease at which she did not laugh, and shrugged into it. 

“For the good of Asgard,” he said.

He held his hand out, not to take hers, but to lead her out before him. Sif took the gesture as he meant it and preceded him, her loaded back before him. He’d no illusions about that either. It wasn’t faith in Loki that gave her reason to show him her back but faith in her own strength. Loki followed her out.


	2. Chapter 2

“How did you find me?”

The question was politely asked; he’d ever a gift for politeness when it suited him. Sif, carrying her helm under her arm, moved beside him through the pressing crowd of the marketplace. After all the years, falling into step with each other remained a natural thing. They’d done it often, on the field and in the gilded halls of Asgard, but that had been long ago.

“Our queen has learned many things,” she said briefly. She glanced and caught his smile, amused rather than approving.

“Your queen,” said Loki, “lest you forget my reasons for coming with you. Try to keep up.”

“I thought you came for the good of Asgard,” she said archly, and he laughed, his head tipping back and his teeth flashing. More than once she’d told him he looked the horse when he laughed, what with how his lips pulled back and his teeth showed and his chin came up; to this, he had always said he’d thought her the horse and he the serpent. These were old memories. She threw them aside, irritated for their persistence. In the thickness of the crowd, her shoulder brushed his arm, and then they’d more room, room enough to take a distance between each other.

He’d suggested an information broker of his acquaintance, “though I haven’t spoken to her in years. She might be dead by now. You know how short their lives are.” 

To this end Sif had accompanied, not followed, Loki through a dark and twisting path, like to but unlike the gleaming starlight trails the queen found purpose in crafting, to a vast star shell, a metal husk crafted around a white dwarf and holding within it the descendants of the many species that had once populated this single, dying star’s many planets, all of them now barren rock. The shell was enormous, several times over the size of Asgard’s own deathless sun, and it was built in layers. Loki’s informant lived in a layer nearer to the middle than the outside, and thus in comparative comfort. Here, the floors were built in great circles around gardens, stretching up to artificial light.

“Something troubles you?” Loki disturbed her thoughts. He was looking down at her without turning his head to her in the slightest. The effect was decidedly foxish. “Not my self, I hope.”

She walked with him some distance before she deigned to answer. He’d fallen silent again by then, his hands clasped at his back, though his fingers twitched. Over the centuries he’d added a few lines to his face and subtracted some of the roundness there, so that he looked more a specter than he ever had; but his tells remained. He wanted for her to speak, so Sif did not speak, not till they’d reached whatever lift it was would take them to the underbelly where Loki’s broker waited. She was thinking of how the queen’s eyes had closed when news came to her of the death of Darcy Lewis’ granddaughter, last of that line on Midgard.

A shivering purple thing that showed sickly green at the edges shoved past Loki to the front of the line, and Loki swayed near to but not against Sif. She felt the brushing of the air on her cheek.

“Our queen—”

“Yours,” he said.

The lift opened. An assortment of persons spilled out of it, and Sif ushered Loki in before her, though they were both of them beat to it by a tall personage with three green heads and one mouth set in the throat. The crush was tight, and Sif had to cradle her helm at her chest. She would have put it on again, though it made her head over-hot, but Loki said, “Let me have it,” and then took it from her without waiting for her to either answer him or tighten her grip. He twisted his hands as more persons pushed into the lift, and her helm, crafted by hand for Sif alone, vanished between his palms.

“Don’t lose that,” she said.

The lift’s doors closed. Loki settled against the back. A small muscle in his throat leapt—he still hated being penned in, she thought—but he said easily enough, “I won’t forget where it is.”

A gentle hum carried the lift down, down. Sif braced her heels against the lurching of her gut. Loki leaned down to speak with her. His shoulder rubbed hers, and his breath was warm on the curve of her ear, yet it was the absence of his hair dripping on her skin that stuck her. He’d cropped it and given up burning it straight. Now it curled close to his ears.

“You were speaking of the queen,” he prompted her.

Sif had never had his gift for words, nor his patience. Now she turned her words over in her mouth, wondering not if she knew how to say the thing she meant to say or if Loki deserved her saying it. Out of old instinct, she surveyed the lift, taking in the measure of each passenger, though it was only one other whose intent could give her cause for concern and she was not a brash youth to weigh him openly. He would only make a game of it. Already he was gaming, to lean down to her as he did as if they were yet in each other’s confidences.

“Your informant will have what we need?” she asked.

Loki straightened, leaving her there. The distance resumed; politeness returned to him.

“She’s many things,” he said, “some of them even unknown to me.”

Sif clicked her tongue on her teeth and glanced across the lift; she caught her reflection a moment in the glimmering silver-wrought metal, saw how her own mouth pursed.

“I could answer you more readily,” said Loki, “if I knew more about what we’re questing for.”

She turned from her reflection. The lift had stopped, but Loki made no move. A number of people stepped off; a number stepped on. The space grew more crowded.

“I know little of it myself. Only that it belongs to Asgard, and it was stolen from us.”

“Surely you were given something else to work with.”

“A vision of it,” she admitted, “little else. And you cannot have that from me.”

“More’s the pity,” Loki said. “I’ve never known what it is you’re thinking.”

She looked sharply at him, but he wasn’t smiling, though she knew that did not mean he wasn’t laughing inside. The joke of old, as Loki had liked to tell it, was that Loki kept his thoughts locked in a box and Sif raised hers on a banner and Thor went out and shouted his for all the nine realms to hear whether they wanted to or not.

“It’s small,” she said. “A black thing the size of my fist, that glows red from within.”

“As I recall,” he said absently, his gaze elsewhere, “your fist has never been small.”

“Not so fat as your mouth,” Sif shot back.

His thin, over-wide mouth curved, and his gaze was on her again. He’d a tiny scar to the right and up from his right eyebrow, and when his brow rose, that pale mark all but disappeared into a small fold. Where he’d got the scar, she didn’t know; it wasn’t one she’d given him.

“Only when your fist has met it,” he said. 

The lift came to a stop again, and Loki stepped forward, saying, “Only another few levels to go, my dear lady Sif.”

*

The information broker’s shop was tucked behind a narrow front suggestive of a walled-up alley; within, it rose three tall stories and boasted expansive, loaded shelves. Lights in the shape of blooming flowers were strung in the air and at the very top, nestled in the improbable ceiling, a clockwork sun clicked and ticked and radiated warmth and rosy shades. Loki vanished into the bookshelves, leaving Sif to the task of speaking with Loki’s informant.

The broker was small and wide and bare, with nothing to show, and spotted comprehensively with holes, round circles punched through the flesh at irregular intervals. Now and then through a hole, or another, Sif caught a glimpse of something else: an eye, a three-tined tongue slithering through a hole and then slithering out again. The broker’s own eyes were wet and weak, and a set of spectacles with revolving lenses were tied around her lopsided head.

“Asgard,” she said by way of greeting. “Sif? Yes, Sif, of the house of…”

A vague look came over her. Out of a hole in her short throat, a many-jointed finger beckoned Sif come closer. Sif ground her feet wide and kept the foot between her self and the low-set desk behind which the broker sat on her little chair with its high, plush back.

“I will stay where I am, thank you.”

“What?” The broker blinked. “Oh, yes. Hello. What was it you wanted?”

“I need your services,” she said again, as she’d said the first the seller had asked her purpose, before Loki had given Sif a little smile, coiling at the corners of his mouth, and then made off for the ladder leading to the balcony above. He’d left Sif to deal with Sif ought to have cuffed his ear.

“My services?” She pressed a hand to her chest, and a thumb dipped into a little pock there. The flesh in each hole was soft and without wrinkle, like that of a babe, and Sif’s skin crept to see that softness. “What services?”

“Information, that I’m told you have.” She reached to her waist, untucking from her belt the pouch she’d set at the back. This, she dropped on the desk. “I come with Asgardian silver, and gold besides, more than enough for fair recompense.”

“Silver? Gold?” 

The broker crowed; her mouth was full of needles, silver shining. Tongues curled with glee, not only in that fearsome mouth. One tongue had a nail driven through it, and from the nail hung a swinging bead, a ruby that sparked in Sif’s eye. The finger had not tempted her. She forced her gaze up again to the laughing broker. Like a shadow, above and behind them, she caught a glimpse of Loki, moving silently between shelves.

“Sif of the house of Lief,” said the broker. “Shield-sister to Thor, king of Asgard, wed to Jane Foster, daughter of Midgard.” Those weak eyes dripped, and in her gut, another burning eye looked out at Sif. The broker drew a cloth out from her desk and dabbed at her eyes beneath the lenses. “No silver, no gold. Take your pouch. Tell me what you seek.”

Sif gave the broker the same story she’d given Loki: a thief had got into the sacred vault of Asgard and stolen from it a dangerous prize, an item of great power made for Asgard and safe-kept by Asgard. The broker’s eyes wandered as Sif spoke, but Sif had known liars and tricksters all her life, and she wouldn’t again mistake this woman’s far-off, unsettled looks for vapidity or disinterest.

The broker hummed. She brought her own hands up from the desk, the cloth still hanging from a thumb, and tip-tapped her fingers up her face, like a spider walking up a wall; then her hands stilled. When they stilled, she turned her weeping eyes on Sif again, and all the weakness had gone from them. 

“A memory.”

Sif arrowed her focus. Whatever unease she’d known, looking at the things that looked back at her, she let it go.

“You know of what I seek?”

“A memory from you,” the broker said. “My price.”

She’d no thing to say to this. For a moment, she’d only confusion. Many things had been asked of her over the centuries: her oaths, her coin, her blood from those who wanted her dead, her kiss from those who wanted her heart. She’d given some things but kept others, but no one had asked for a memory. A hot thing came up in her mouth. Her tongue took its edge.

“And why should I allow you entrance to my mind?”

“I collect knowledge,” said the broker. She was smiling now, or Sif thought she smiled, for all her needle teeth shone. “Knowledge for knowledge. My price. Think on it. I will wait.” The broker spread her hands out. “I am here.”

Sif lifted her head, but Loki had disappeared again, gone deeper into the shelves on the second floor or perhaps higher to the third; perhaps, she thought, he’d gone entirely. She let nothing show on her face, though a strange, unfeeling tightness had started in her chest. It wouldn’t have been the first time Loki had turned his back on Asgard. What loyalty did he have to Asgard? True, he had fought in Asgard’s name, but that had been nearer to a thousand years ago than not. Certainly he’d been quick enough to make Sif know Thor was her king, not his, and Jane the same, though he had still called Thor brother if only in passing and he hadn’t said a word against the queen.

“You must bring it back,” the queen had said to Sif. “Please.” Jane had drunk of the dark, holy waters of the first and eldest of Asgard’s rivers centuries ago, and yet she was still of Midgard: as queen, she asked and did not order. The queen had looked up at Sif when she said of her, “please,” and worry had haunted Jane’s dark, clever eyes.

“Of course, my queen,” said Sif, and she had set her fist to her breast and bowed her head, though Jane sighed and said, “Sif, stop.”

The broker waited for her. The flower lights bobbed, as if on quiet currents. False sunlight glowed sweet as honey. Sif swallowed and set her teeth.

“What memory would you have?”

The shark’s smile unsheathed. Sif had thought it wide before; now it seemed as though the broker’s whole head hinged at the jaw and was opening to her.

“Your happiest moment,” said the broker. “No worry. I’ll leave the facts. The feeling is my price.”

Sif closed her eyes and thought not of the queen saying, “I’ve told you to stop bowing to me probably a million times. It makes me feel like everyone’s laughing at me for being short,” or how grave Thor had been when he told Sif the vault had been breached, or even of a time long ago when she had felt with her fingertips how the corner of Loki’s mouth twisted as he smiled. She thought of Asgard’s towers shining bright as glass under the light of countless stars and the deathless sun the first king of Asgard had set in the sky.

When she opened her eyes, Asgard gleaming yet in her mind, the broker was ready for her. That many-jointed finger extended from her throat, and a second, and a third, and the broker waved for Sif to step forward and then to kneel. Her shoulders tensed. The first finger settled above her right eye, the second finger above her left, and the third pressed, unstoppably, between her lips and her teeth and onto her tongue. She would have recoiled—bitten the first joint off and spat it out—but there was no finger in her mouth. 

The queen Frigga smiled down at Sif, who was only a child, one of the young ladies honored with the queen’s patronage. Asgard’s sun shone in the queen’s hair; it haloed her so that she looked not aesir, but divine. She was all light, the queen, brighter than that great star forever entwined with Asgard, brighter even than the gold thread sewn into the queen’s skirts in the pattern of stars.

“Tomorrow,” said the queen, “you may train in the yards.”

Sif’s fingers still hurt from needlework. Twice that day she had drawn blood from her palms. This was not the first time she’d done such. The sewing needle was not the blade she wanted for. Looking up at the sun queen, Sif felt the bleeding in her hands though the spots had scabbed over; her palms itched. Many had mocked her for her poor embroidery and her tendency to linger outside the yard, but never before had the queen. It wasn’t her hands that stung, but her chest.

“My queen,” she said, and her throat pained her, “you—you wouldn’t joke—”

Then the queen did something very shocking. She knelt on the polished white marble floor, her gown catching inelegantly under her knees, so that she and Sif were of a height. She took Sif’s hands, her rough, scabbed hands that only yesterday she’d used to try to beat Loki over the head for some smart remark. (“I won’t have your handkerchief but Thor won’t care if the flowers look like shits.”) The queen took Sif’s hands, and the queen held them to her breast. As the queen was so beautiful and so very perfect, Sif had always thought her hands would be smooth and soft, like a lady’s hands, but her fingers were worn from weaving and callused at the tips.

“You’re right, dear Sif,” said the queen in her own dear voice. “I would not joke of such a thing as this.”

Sif tried to speak; she had no words, no tongue, no voice. A great knot had fitted in her chest.

“Tomorrow,” said the queen again, “you will not come to embroider with my ladies’ daughters, but you will go, as you would go, to train in the yards with my own sons.”

“Why?” Sif managed, though she found it to be faltering when it finally came out.

The queen’s smile turned sad at the edges, a sadness Sif had seen on her mother’s face once or twice, when she thought Sif would not see it, and the queen lifted one hand to touch Sif’s face.

“Your brother Heimdall sees all that is,” said the queen. “The Allfather sees all that was. And I see what might be. But more than that, I would have you do this because you are unhappy, and I would see you happy.”

Sif dragged on air. She breathed in; she struggled with it. To cry before the queen— She could not do that; she would not want the queen to see her weeping like some babe with a skinned knee. And so instead Sif threw herself at the queen and buried her face in the queen’s shoulder, and the queen wrapped her arms around Sif to hold her there. Something powerful filled Sif, a consumptive joy so fierce that in the end, for all her bravery, she wept after all into the queen Frigga’s neck.

“Oh, Sif,” said Frigga, a summer breeze slowly fading, “you will be the truest warrior Asgard has ever known,” and once, only the once, she turned her head and very softly kissed Sif’s hair above her ear. Then Frigga was gone again.

A tapping sound roused Sif. Something slithered on her tongue and then withdrew. A pressure at her eyes eased. She opened her eyes then and found she was crying, quietly so, her eyes burning with it. A terrible loss sat inside her; she could not name it. She remembered the queen’s worn fingers cradling Sif’s small cheek, and she remembered the burning arrows fired to light Frigga’s funeral pyre.

Sif brought her hands to her eyes; she struck the tears away. The broker’s throat was empty now, those damned prying fingers back wherever they’d come from, and the broker’s wet eyes were soft behind her glasses. She offered her cloth to Sif, and Sif shook her head hard once.

“I apologize,” said the broker. “It’s often hard.”

Sif swallowed down the knot in her throat, the lump in her chest. 

“I’ve paid your price,” she said. “Now tell me what you know.”

The broker withdrew her cloth, folded it neatly in squares, and set it back in a drawer in the desk. She bid Sif wait and then stood, carefully, dark things moving through her holes, to look through the shelves at her back. Two books gained and lost her interest as quickly, but a metal box the width of Sif’s hand arrested her. Fingering it, she considered the corners; then she drew that out and tottered back.

“This may help,” said the broker. She set the box on the table and rapped it with her nail on the side. The opposing side dropped open, unfolding, and a wet, burnt hand fell out. The stench of rot and old coals rolled over them in a wave. Sif looked away. 

“It was fire?” asked the broker, needlessly. “Well. Well. What you seek. Hm.” She touched one of the gnarled fingers and then twisted another, and Sif watched as a glowing line traced its way up the ragged wrist, along the palm, and up the small finger. Flesh, dripping from the bone, had hardened like stone there.

“A very old thing,” the broker murmured. “In a very old place. With a very old heart. There’s a spell on it.”

“What kind of spell?”

The broker turned brisk. “An old one. To hide it. A blind man watches it.” She parted two of the fingers from each other. “It’s in the dark spaces. Do you know? The dead worlds.” And she said in the old tongue, “Taa,” legend’s birth place of the old god Galactus, now himself dead, and then pressed the fingers back to the palm, closing the hand. The hand she then tucked back into the box. “What you seek, you find in the belt of Taa.”

Sif’s cheeks were sticky, her eyelashes, when she blinked, still slick. But for the crying, she felt clear and clean.

“Tell me more,” she said. “What world? Where in the belt?” The belt of Taa was enormous beyond consideration, a sprawling collection of innumerable dead worlds, the rotted wood on the flank of Yggdrasill.

The broker ran her thumb over the box and it, like the hand, closed. “That is all I have.”

“There is more,” Sif said, articulating each word with purpose. “Tell me it.”

“I apologize,” said the broker. She folded her hands together over the metal box. “There is more. I have only this. I see much but not all.”

“For Asgard, I came here,” said Sif, her voice rising. “I have paid your price. All you’ve given me is a general direction—”

A hand caught her arm and then, in a fashion perhaps meant to be soothing if he were anyone but Loki and she anyone but Sif, slid down to cradle her elbow and draw her near. The muted warmth of his body met and embraced her; his hip fitted to her side. She turned and the knob of her ponytail struck his cheek, but Loki’s smile was meant not for her but for the woman whose hands were still held out as if to ward Sif off.

“Yes, it’s all very useful,” said Loki to the broker, “more than we could have hoped for. Thank you so much for your time. But we really have to be going. Urgent matters of state.”

Sif twisted her arm and reversed their grips; now she held his biceps as in a vise. A tendon at the back of his arm trembled beneath her thumb, and then that, too, was as smooth as the kindness he offered the information broker.

In warning, Sif began: “Loki—”

“Sif,” he said, turning that guileless smile on her now, “there is much we have to ponder, in what she has kindly traded us.” His eyes were steady; he did not blink; the skin at the corners neither creased nor tensed though his smile remained. Her hand on his arm eased, but she would not take it away.

“Then we will talk outside,” Sif said to him.

Loki bowed his head neatly and murmured a sweet farewell to the broker, a sweet farewell and to Sif’s ear hollow, and then he let Sif drag him from that gleaming, empty shop.

*

“Do you care to eat?” Loki asked. “Personally, I’m famished.”

At some point, though Sif still held tightly to his arm, Loki had covered her hand with his free hand, as if they were lovers out for a walk. He’d not stopped outside the shop nor at any of the many shops they’d passed walking fast from the broker’s place, and they were nearing the lift when he turned abruptly to her. The curls at his ear caught the filtered light; they glimmered blackly.

She pulled on him and he gave up scouring the ring of shops for a vendor’s stall. His eyes were as green as ever; that hadn’t changed and that she hadn’t forgot. 

“Will you forget food? Why should we speak of food?”

“Why, Sif,” said Loki, and he pursed his lips at her, “you’re so delicate. I’d hate for you to swoon.”

“Do not test your tongue on me,” she said. “I have never been delicate, and I have never swooned, and you know this to be true.”

Loki’s pursed lips parted; he sighed and then, extraordinarily, he touched a fingertip to a length of hair loose at her ear. “And where is the lady Sif who once took her pleasure where she found it?”

“I find no pleasure here,” said she, “and I do not seek it.”

“Not with present company, you mean.”

“When have I ever found my pleasure with you?”

“That,” said Loki mildly, “is a loaded die you cast.”

The finger at her ear turned so he stroked the back of his nail down her jaw, only a moment. She trapped her hand and twisted so the wrist turned at odds with his arm, and he winced, his cheek tightening and his forever flapping lips winching to the side.

“You know something I do not,” she said.

“I know many things you do not,” Loki countered. “For example—”

And then he was free of her grip, as though he’d turned to mist, and he stepped forward against her back, his lips at her ear.

“But perhaps you had something in particular that troubles you.”

Sif moved to face him and moved again, for he was walking in an elongated loop about her, or about something, and she would keep her eye on him. She remembered that moment in the broker’s shop when she had wondered if perhaps Loki had simply left her there. He hadn’t yet.

“Your informant spoke in loose terms,” Sif said, “but you understood something in them.”

He stopped walking, some few steps apart from her. A harried person with an abundance of fur and arms squeezed between them, and when they’d passed, Sif crossed the distance to stand directly before Loki. His height necessitated her lifting her chin, but she had never been dominated by a man taller than she. 

“I understood nothing,” he admitted. “I should have warned you. She’s always like that; it’s why I don’t go to her often.”

Sif closed her eyes and mustered patience. “Then why did we waste time going to her?” Time, she thought, and more than that; but she’d no wish to poke at that jagged place, that little spot of nothing, not now, not yet, and perhaps never. It was a dullness that throbbed in her breast.

“You may have wasted your time,” said Loki. “But I found a rather beautiful pendant. I think it suits you well.”

He lifted his hand and uncurled his fingers. From a fine chain, a perfectly round, perfectly clear ball dropped, and it hung evenly—it hung perfectly, without so much as a single shiver—before her eyes. No thing could be glimpsed through it; though Loki held it in front of his breast, the green of his armor showed neither through the bauble nor on it. What hands had shaped it and of what she could not guess. As Sif took it from Loki—he allowed the chain to drip off his finger and pool in her palm—she weighed it and found it weightless, and what she’d thought as clear was in fact no more than an absence of anything.

“What is it?” She wound the chain and cradled the ball more fully. The surface was sleek and cool; to her skin, at least, it felt real. “I’ve never seen the like.”

“A Norn’s tear,” Loki said. He traced the edge of it with his fingertip. His fingers brushed her hand. “A precious thing. There aren’t very many of them left. My mother—” He said it in a detached sort of way. “She’d one that she set in her diadem, but its magic had been used up well before that.”

Sif made a fist around the tear. Cool, yes, but her skin was unchilled, and it did little to quell the heat stirring inside her chest. “Is this what you were doing up there? When I was paying for riddles?”

“I knew she had one, but I couldn’t take it unless her attention was elsewhere. I’ve never had use for one before anyway. But perhaps my lady will find what she seeks in it.” His tone dried on the _my lady_ ; he mocked even then.

Had the ball been glass, it would have broken in her grip. In a low voice she said, “Do you know what price I paid for you to steal this?” If she hadn’t stood so close to him, he wouldn’t have heard her over the incessant crowd.

“Some secret of yours,” he suggested, “though you haven’t many.” He looked pityingly on her. “Did you confide in her your helpless love for Thor?”

Sif grabbed his starched collar, just peeking up from the light armor he wore, and hauled him through the crowd; she smashed him against a thick wall set between two small shops. The crowd made a berth for them. The whispers started, the questions following. Loki looked passingly startled to be thrown so, then he smoothed that away as he smoothed everything away until he stood before her as a blameless stranger would.

“Temper,” he said.

“You used me,” said Sif. She held that neatly shaped collar so it wrinkled in her grip. Perhaps even a stitch might tear, and how he’d hate that. “You used me, and you hadn’t even the decency to tell me beforehand what you meant to do.”

“And you’re not using me?” he parried. “Let’s be honest between ourselves, Sif, the only reason you came looking for me now is because I’m the only person clever enough to find you what you need.”

She tightened her hand, tightened it so that his breath caught as the collar bit on the far side into his throat. One of his fingers rose; it brushed her thigh and fell again. He looked down at her, his chin turned awkwardly so that he could breathe some, and the faintest line creased the skin above his nose. He didn’t know. Sif pushed him back again and let go. The coin pouch at her hip shifted, heavy on her belt.

Loki was at her back then. He kept his hands to himself. She heard his armor creak; he adjusted his collar, long fingers—she knew—pressing flat the distortions she’d yanked from the fabric. She waited. Calmness came slowly to her. What had she expected? He was Loki, after all, and no man sworn to Asgard or to her, and he hadn’t known what the broker would ask of Sif; he hadn’t known, she thought, because he hadn’t cared.

He spoke.

“What payment did she want from you?”

“A moment of happiness,” said Sif. It was more than he deserved from her.

His footsteps were soft, nearly lost in the noise of the crowd all about them, people pressing in on them and then slipping away, their voices rising and ebbing and rising again. He came to her now, as she had come to him.

“I’m sure you’ll find more happiness in time.”

She rounded on him. “Do you think them interchangeable? That one moment is the same as another?”

He studied her as though there were more he’d ask but knew he oughtn’t. Curiosity had always been his first failing. He’d got them all in trouble several times over because he couldn’t help but pick at something he shouldn’t have picked. She couldn’t fault ignorance when she’d known this well enough.

“Do you care so long as you’ve got what you wanted?” she pressed, and Loki looked away.

“Think what you will,” he said. “But it’s your quest we’re on. The tear’s yours.”

She took a single step, so that his breath warmed her brow; it shivered in her eyelashes.

“Do not keep things from me again,” she warned him. “Not in this. I won’t forgive you it.”

He smiled without humor. “You’re many things, Sif,” he said, “but forgiving? Never.”

She’d long years of practice holding her temper, honing her patience, but he spoke truthfully, and the truth of it—that she had not forgiven him, that she should have remembered this—perhaps was what made her want to turn from him and leave him there, as he hadn’t left. I know you, Loki, she thought; and she clutched onto that old bitter swelling in her chest.

“Let’s go,” Sif said. Again he followed her.


	3. Chapter 3

Loki fell in a half step behind her as Sif pushed through the crowd. The line of her shoulders was brutally straight. Remarkable that the night before he’d thought her rendered alien by time. He’d learned long ago to leave a measure of space between the two of them when she’d her temper going. The edge of his collar on the right of his jaw had lost its shape to her hand. Her long hair swung accompaniment to her long steps.

He lengthened his own stride that they would walk alongside each other, though he took care to leave room between their shoulders, or her shoulder and his arm. Sif’s eyes flicked: she looked at him and then forward again, her jaw tightening.

“They’ve rooms for hire,” he suggested to her profile.

“Why would we need a room?”

He smiled and took a quicker step so he was a beat before her. “You know you shouldn’t give me openings like that.”

“I’d rather fuck a goat,” Sif said.

“Well,” said Loki, “you _have_ changed. The old Sif would have settled for nothing less than a horse.”

That long look under her lashes again, like she was weighing the gap between his armor and his jaw, and whether or not the tip of her glaive might slide between the two. Perhaps that was just his fancy. He turned sideways to accommodate a gaggle of asymmetrical children with their eye stalks all twisting to stare up at him. He showed them his teeth and wiggled his fingers hello.

“Horses were more to your taste.” She muttered it.

He swung back to Sif. “Speak up, horse,” he said. “I couldn’t hear you.”

Whatever humor had sparked in her had gone out by then. The frown was back at the corners of her mouth, a dour thing casting shadows across her glowing face. Now when she looked at him she did so squarely, without even a hint of the tease.

“Why do we need a room?”

He gestured to her hand, fisted at her thigh. The shortened length of silver chain, looped twice around her thumb before disappearing again into her fist, swung from between two of her fingers.

“I need the space, and the privacy. If I can help it, I’d like to not have to solve it out here.”

She brought her fist up between them. Her knuckles stopped near to his nose, but he held his pace next to her, and he didn’t blink. It was hardly the first time she’d shoved her fist in his face. She held it there as they walked. He was, he thought, rather enjoying this even if Sif wasn’t, but that was hardly new either.

“Do you mean to say,” she demanded, “that you don’t know how to use this?”

“I didn’t mean to say anything,” he countered. “You’re the one who said it, not I.”

She dropped her hand and thumped the fist twice against her thigh, the second time harder than the first. Likely she imagined his face.

“You don’t even know how to use it!”

“Again,” he said, “I didn’t say it. You did.”

At this she stopped and forced him, again, to stop. Those brandished knuckles came to his chest. She knocked them once on the thin padded armor there. He felt it deep in his sternum, the thought of her fist at his chest rather than the actual blow, so light as to be nothing.

“Does it matter who puts it in words?”

“Not particularly,” he allowed.

“And if it’s useless?” She unfurled her fingers. The little ball of nothing sat on her palm, so steadily—without even the minute tremors that ran through any living person—that it hurt to look at it. Loki made a point of glancing down at it and then slowly up again to Sif.

“If it’s useless,” she said in that low voice, the words shivering hard in her mouth, “then this was all for nothing.” On the _nothing_ , she closed her hand tightly again around the scryer’s tear—the snapping shut of her fingers was more a blow than that soft knock to his chest piece—and resumed her devastating pace.

“And if I’m supposed to apologize,” said Loki, catching up to her in a mere two steps, “it would be easier if you’d tell me what it is I’ve done wrong. Not that I don’t enjoy groveling for things I haven’t done. It’s only, I’d like to know, for future reference.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sif curtly.

He let the smile come. 

“You’re still a poor liar.”

She rounded on him. The long tail of her hair passed over her shoulder and caught there before, with aching slowness, slipping over it to settle at her back. 

“The room,” she reminded him.

He would have taken them to one but Sif insisted on paying for it properly from that bag of Asgard coin. She hadn’t always been such a stickler for propriety; he suspected it was more a rebuke than anything else, as though Loki was meant to take offense to the very notion of paying for something.

The room itself was utilitarian, bare of anything more than a simple bed along the wall and an erotic video feed along the wall that played when Sif turned on the light. She blanched. 

“I did want to spare you the indignity,” said Loki in her ear. “Now that desk clerk thinks us engaged.”

She drew away from him, preceding Loki into the windowless room. He thought of making a joke about her hair and how it would look fanned out on the sheets, then, studying the stiffness of her back and the angle of her hips, he thought better of his tongue.

“I don’t need to know what the desk clerk thinks,” Sif said.

“It wasn’t very interesting,” he said. “Fairly dull. He didn’t have much imagination.”

She looked sharply at him.

“Don’t worry,” Loki said, “I’ve never found a way into your mind.”

“Good,” she said. “Stay out of it.”

That, he thought, is up to you; but he kept that in as well. Whatever had happened in the shop to upset her so, she was still chafing against it. What moment of happiness could the broker have taken from her? He could have flattered himself but that was a game he’d lost interest in long before the desk clerk had lost interest in sex. Knowing Sif, it could have been anything; she took offense so readily. She’d shouted at him once for stealing a ripe peach from her hand after she’d taken the first bite.

Sif eyed him. He’d been caught staring again. Loki smiled easily. 

“Well worth your coin,” he said approvingly so she’d roll her eyes at him. 

Sif’s eyes stayed precisely where they were. “Turn that off,” she said, gesturing to the flickering wall.

He did so, and then, since Sif showed no desire to move anywhere near the bed, he sat down on it and stretched a leg out before him and brought the other foot up to rest on his knee, as if to take off his boots. He held his hand out to her. The rising redness in her face, at least, was worth the coin.

“The tear, if you don’t mind,” he clarified.

“How will you know if it works or not?”

“Mother did teach me a few of her tricks,” said Loki dryly. He wriggled his fingertips at her. 

To his astonishment, she did roll her eyes then, and her left shoulder even dropped what might have been half a centimeter, and she took the one step needed to stand by the bed. Sif opened her hand and turned it so the tear fell smoothly. Its progress was halted by the chain still wound about her thumb. He could have unwound it with a finger, untwisting the links from her half-bent knuckle, first the one loop and then the second. Instead he waited as Sif dragged it off in one jerk. The skin at her knuckle showed white, then the blood came back in.

The tear was neither warm nor cool to his hand. He pinched it with his fingers and his thumb and drew a little rune on it with his fingernail. Nothing came forth at that, so he drew another rune and when that failed, a third, and he listened and felt for a reaction either within the tear or in the nebulous other realm into and out of which it stretched, the realm the queen Frigga had first introduced him to when he was still a child. Loki closed his eyes and stretched out, feeling as he pushed another rune into the tear.

For a time, he worked without interruption; then Sif stretched her legs for the third time and the quiet rustle of her chest plate rubbing against leather stuck in his ear.

“You could sit,” he suggested, peeking at her.

She straightened, sticking her chest out. “Standing suits me.”

“Then stop moving. You’re making it difficult to concentrate.”

“My sincerest apologies, wise Loki,” she said with a deep bow.

“I’m glad your sense of humor survived.” 

He said this under his breath. She heard, of course. Sif always heard. Somehow she found another half an inch in her spine she’d yet to iron out. He probed again at the orb. Something distantly probed back at him. He smiled. Sif resettled her weight again.

“Sif,” he began.

“Did she show you this?” Sif asked. 

Her gaze was on him. There was something in her face he didn’t know. A wonder, that. He’d taken pride in translating her tics and all the little flicks of her lashes and how the muscles in her strong jaw moved.

“Be specific,” he said.

Sif looked away from him then. It was only her eyes, sliding to look at a point beside and beneath his ear, near to the corner of his jaw, but he felt that weight moving from him.

“The queen,” she said.

He could have played obtuse, if only to nettle Sif.

“No,” said Loki. “Mother’s tear was only glass by the time Odin brought me back home from Jötunheimr.”

That was all Sif had wanted to know, evidently. She didn’t press him. Folding her arms over her chest, she leaned back against the wall. Her thighs were thick in her trousers.

“She did give me the tools, though,” said Loki, “which was more than the Allfather gave me. He preferred taking.”

“As do you,” said Sif to the door.

He worked in silence after that. Certainly that was for the best. With silence he could concentrate more closely on the tear. After a few hours, its secrets began to fall one by one into his hands.

*

Loki clapped his hands together and stood, his hand on the back wall for balance. The wards were drawn, the way lines cast, and to his eye at least the room had transformed from a cheap hotel room to a place well-shadowed and steeped in passing magic. To Sif’s eye, he imagined, it looked much the same as it had before he’d turned to the dirty work. When he’d climbed onto the bed to scrawl across the ceiling with his fingers, she’d looked at him with her eyebrows as high up as they’d go.

He pushed off the wall and rejoined her at the center of the room, near to the bed. She still had her eyebrows up. Loki pivoted on his heel, double-checking the delicate web he’d sketched and, beneath it, darker, obscuring the metal walls with their thoroughness, the tether points that would bind them to the scryer’s tear.

“You truly know what you’re doing?” she asked him. He thought perhaps under the scorn she was genuinely curious. She kept following his gaze around the room.

“As I’ve said on many occasions in the past, yes,” he said. He wiped his fingers absently on his chest. “And I was always right.”

Sif narrowed her eyes at him. “That isn’t how I recall it.”

He smiled at her. He felt it creeping up to his eyes. 

“Have faith, Sif,” he said, and he fetched the tear from his collar.

“And what do you mean to do with it?”

“I don’t remember you asking so many questions.”

In the darkness he’d pulled to this metal place, her hazel eyes showed dark as river stones plucked from the depths.

“The task is mine,” she told him.

“And yet I’m doing all the work,” said Loki.

“All of it is for Asgard.”

“Oh, yes,” he agreed, “Asgard.”

“Tell me,” said Sif.

“Don’t you trust me?” he teased. 

Perhaps it was the sickening solidness of the tear—how it didn’t seem to move even when he rolled it in his hand—or perhaps it was that he’d left a foot of distance between the two of them, Loki and Sif, knowing there was a greater distance that would not be bridged no matter how close he chose to stand to her. Whatever it was, the joke fell flat. He knew she didn’t trust him. She was there anyway. He focused on the tear.

“You’ll have to touch it, too,” he said, answering her indirectly but not so much so she’d scowl at him for it. “You know what the whatever it is looks like and I don’t.”

“Loki,” she said, meaning _get on with it_ ; but she did stretch her hand out and touch the tips of her fingers to the smooth side of the tear. Her nails were clean and short, cut close to the quick. Ever practical, Asgard’s Sif. 

“All you need to do is think of your prize. What it looks like, what the broker told you about where it is—”

Her eyes lidded and then her lashes were fully down. He watched her as she closed her eyes. He watched how her eyes moved under her eyelids in short movements. Her mouth was firmly set.

“All I need to do,” he said softly, “is give the tear the power it wants to take us there. You point the nose, and I’ll put us there.”

The room darkened. The lines he’d sketched, the points he’d made: all of it flared and then steadied. He saw Sif react to that burst of light; her eyes stilled and her shoulders came square again. As the magic settled and the tear in his hand glimmered, something at last rising out of its vast contained emptiness, Loki watched her. The universe thinned around them. The air thickened. Yggdrasill whispered. Sif drew in a deep breath, and in the unearthly half-light she was dappled, her skin painted over with the shadows of leaves and the sunlight peeking around them. The sour sweetness of an overripe peach burst on his tongue.

The Norn’s tear stirred.

*

The queen’s extensive gardens housed several long rows of different fruit-bearing trees, set in a patchwork order. People liked to say the Allfather had a reason for everything, but Loki knew Frigga had her own reasons for doing things. He’d asked why it was she planted the trees the way she had, not separated by species but intermingled. His mother had laughed and then bent to straighten his collar for him.

“So they can get to know each other,” she told him.

Thor would have said something silly like, “They’re just trees,” but Loki said, “Is it important for them to know each other?” Privately he agreed with what Thor would have thought. They were only trees.

Frigga smiled. Her cheeks dimpled. She’d secrets in her eyes.

“It’s important for everyone to know each other. Here. Let me show you something.” 

She stood and held her hand out to him, and Loki, who was still small—taller than Thor then but much thinner, and some in the palace snidely called him “the shadow twin” when he was supposed to be in bed—and didn’t mind walking with his hand in his mother’s, took it. Holding his hand, Frigga led him up to the highest spire in the palace, the tower they called Odin’s Eye since it looked out over almost everything in Asgard. The tower was plated with the fine metal that showed solid outside but transparently from within. He followed her to a window that overlooked the queen’s garden.

He searched for it and then he looked up at Frigga. “Where is it?”

His mother scrunched down—even her face scrunched—and she pointed at a tiny speck of green far below. Loki squinted and pressed his nose to the window.

“That’s only one tree,” he said.

“Yes, a peach tree,” said his mother. She looked evenly at him. Their shoulders were pressed together. He wished he had dimples like Mother did. “I brought that tree with me from my mother’s hall when I married your father, the Allfather. When I made my garden that tree was the first tree I planted.”

Loki pressed his nose against the trick glass again to study the little green thing Frigga had carried into her marriage.

“My magic is rooted,” Frigga said to his reflection. “When I planted the tree I planted my magic with it. So as it grew, my garden grew too, but only around that one tree. This way the palace could stay where it was but I could have my gardens too.”

“Is that why the trees are planted the way they are?” Loki asked the queen. “Around the peach tree?”

Frigga dimpled again and tweaked his nose. “Clever bird,” she called him, her clever bird.

Loki ate fruit from the queen’s gardens, as did everyone who called the palace home. Much of the vegetables they ate came from the queen’s gardens, too, though the grain they had brought in from another realm. He spent weeks wandering the gardens after his mother had showed him the first tree, the little peach tree at the heart, mapping the patterns the queen had made in the planting of her trees. Apples, oranges, peaches he ate, but he never ate from the first tree. Thor never ate from it either, but then Thor didn’t care for exploring tame gardens. After a whole month of watching the tree Loki concluded that no one ate from that tree, not even the queen. When its fruit grew ripe, and the first tree bore fruit through all the seasons, it dropped the peaches to the soil where they slowly rotted and wore away.

The lords and ladies of the court sent their daughters to visit with the queen. That was how he met Sif, how Thor met her too. She was scrawny and far too tall and she had a nose overly long even for a face as long as Sif’s face, and Frigga liked her very much. That was how Sif came to be in the gardens most afternoons, ruining the knees of her fine dresses as she wrestled Thor in the grass. Thor didn’t mind the tameness of the gardens when Sif was with them.

“Well, I mind,” Loki said hotly. “She’s too noisy.”

“She’s right here, your highness,” Sif said. That was always what she called Loki, _your highness_. “And you’re too small. Everyone says so.”

“He’s taller than me,” said Thor.

“Everyone’s taller than you,” said Sif as Loki said, “Father’s goat is taller than you, Thor.”

Thor had laughed and said, “See! You’re suited. Be friends, the two of you.” 

Loki was shorter than Sif in those days, and for many days after, and he’d had to look up to meet her eyes. Sif went red under her summer tan and furiously, she scowled at Loki. She had a mole on her cheek the size of the tip of his little finger. He thought so anyway. He’d never had the chance to test the fit.

“He’s too fine for me,” said Sif, turning away. She had a hole in her pretty skirt and a grass stain running up the bottom, and Loki could have laughed at her for it but she cared too little for the dresses she wore out for him to have satisfaction in it. He hid up a tree instead and watched Sif and Thor play at warriors.

Then she took a peach from the first tree. Mayhap she’d done so before. He only knew she’d done it because he was up in that tree reading when Sif, in a dark red dress with her dark brown hair tied up in a clever knot, dropped in the shade. She sighed deeply. Loki stilled. He thought she might still have been mad at him for stealing a decorated pin from her hair the other day.

“You don’t care what you wear as it is,” he’d objected when she shouted at him to give it back. “And I didn’t take it. Why would I want your pin?”

“My father will know if I don’t bring it back,” she yelled. “Who else would take my pin? You’re the only one stupid enough to steal anything from me!”

She was the one who had come out to the gardens with an enameled pin in her hair, a long pin with a shivering tail of small stone beads that matched her eyes. He’d complimented her on it, and Sif had frowned at him as she always frowned at Loki and never once at Thor. He didn’t have the pin anymore. Loki had hidden it in the queen’s jewelry box.

Now, Loki sank back against the tree trunk and though of how he might get out of this trap. Sif might have had the face of a horse, but she could climb a tree almost as quickly as Loki could and as angrily as a bear. Her paws nearly hurt as much as a bear’s, too. He pressed the book flat to his chest.

But Sif didn’t climb the tree or shout at him or even call for Thor. She just sat there in the shade. Summer had come to Asgard with apologies for the harshness of the last winter. After a few minutes of Sif not doing anything but lying in the shade, he thought it possible she was overheated. Cautiously he relaxed. Even more cautiously he leaned forward to peek at her.

She’d tipped her head back. The sun, high in its arc and caught in the leaves, threw dappled shadows over her long face and longer neck. Her eyes were shut to the sun. Some of the light had settled in the corner of her right eye. Loki had moved too far forward: he could make out the top of his head on her shoulder. He leaned back, heart racing. Very close, he thought. He waited for her to grow bored and leave, as Thor would; he waited longer than Thor would have waited. She didn’t move at all for the longest time except to breathe and once or twice to stretch or to shake out her skirts and grumble. Loki rested his head on the trunk and looked up at the sun flashing now and then between the leaves when a breeze ran on its toes through the gardens. He was thinking how the shadows must move like so across Sif.

Finally, he heard her sigh. Her skirts rustled; she stood. That was it, then. She’d go and then Loki, alone, could climb down from the tree. He braced his hand on the tree’s trunk and leaned out again, just far enough to catch a glimpse of her hair as she left. He saw her eyes instead, as she considered the lowest branches. Then, between the leaves, near his foot, he saw her hand come up. She grabbed a peach, a very ripe one, and she pulled. The peach came free in her hand. He stared at the place where he’d seen her fingers peek through. Sif had taken a peach. A wet sound reached him: she’d taken a peach, and then she’d taken a bite.

Loki dropped out of the tree. He landed gently on his bare feet in the grass, his heels arched up. Sif startled and swore and knocked her head on one of the branches and swore again. Peach stained her lips. A bit of juice showed on her chin. Her fingers loosened around the peach; she wasn’t going to throw it at him.

“You aren’t allowed to eat that,” he said, and he snatched the peach out of her hand.

“What—” She went monstrously red again. “Give that back! That’s my peach!”

“It’s my mother’s peach, not yours,” Loki said, “and you can’t have it.”

Sif swelled. “Give it back or I’ll—I’ll knock your nose off!”

He slipped out of her reach, jogging backwards on his toes. She grabbed for him again and missed, again. The peach juice was cool on his wrist. He held the fruit up higher, as high as he could manage.

“I can outrun Thor blind-folded,” he taunted her. “I can outrun you, horse.”

Sif came for him, and Loki darted between the trees. He knew the queen’s gardens better than anyone except Frigga herself, but Sif kept up with him. He heard her shoes, how she clobbered through the grass. How she heard his footsteps, he couldn’t say. Loki walked more quietly than a cat at night. He ran faster, leaning into his gait. She caught him anyway.

She said, “Got you,” and slammed into his back. They tumbled together into the thinning shadow of an apple tree. He rolled over, thinking to spring to his feet again, but Sif threw her arm across his chest and then her body. He grunted and kicked. He only hit the tree. Sif was laughing, triumphant over him, and she slung a leg over his waist. Her skirts knotted between them. For once, her dress was clean. Her smile gleamed as brightly as polished metal. He was afraid to touch her and leave his handprints on her light blue dress.

“Now give me back my peach,” she said.

He could have given it to her. After all, she’d caught him. He could always tell Mother later. Sif’s breath came quick and light. A coil of hair had come loose from her knot, and it hung limply by her cheek, the cheek with the small spot on it the width of his fingertip.

Loki brought the peach to his mouth with both hands and took three swift bites, swallowing the fruit without chewing. It was more sweet than sour or tangy, so sweet he knew the fruit had hung too long from that branch. The sweetness flooded his teeth. He watched her as he ate it. Her eyebrows shot up and then she drew an outraged breath, her sticky lips shining, and then—as he swallowed the third bite and his tongue curled at the ripeness of the peach—she said, “Loki,” as if she were swearing it.

He threw the rest of the peach between the trees.

“There,” he said to Sif, her skirts tangled and his waist burning between her legs. “If you can find it, it’s yours.”

She caught his hand, the one he’d thrown the peach with. His hand was as sticky as her lips.

“That was my peach, Loki,” said Sif lowly. “Why do you always steal my things?”

“Why do you always wear dresses to wrestle Thor?” he asked.

“That doesn’t concern you!” she snapped.

Loki sneered at her. “Do you want him to think you’re a lady? Do you want to be Thor’s lady?”

“I’m not anyone’s lady,” Sif yelled, “not Thor’s and not yours!”

Before dinner, Frigga exclaimed over Loki’s eye. “How did this happen?” she asked him. She traced the edges of the bruise with her finger and thumb, measuring the width of it. “Loki, my little bird—”

“Sif hit him,” said Thor wearily.

Frigga cupped Loki’s face in her hands and stared sternly into his eyes. He wondered what she saw there; innocence, if he were even half the liar Sif thought him. His mother stroked her thumb over his cheek, just grazing the bruise. She looked nearly as weary as Thor sounded.

“Why did Sif hit you? You must be kinder to her,” said Frigga reprovingly. “What did you say to her?”

“How should I know? She’s a brute,” said Loki, stung. He’d meant to lie anyway, but his mother’s look, as if she knew he’d done something to Sif to deserve it, cracked on his ribs. “I didn’t do anything at all, and she hit me.”

His mother sighed and said, “Loki—”

“It’s the truth,” he swore. “All of it.”

“You’ve said ugly things to her before,” Frigga reminded him. 

Loki glanced away from her. He hadn’t wanted her to see the truth in his, but she saw it in his sudden shyness.

“ _Loki_ ,” she said again.

He stuck his chin out and said, “I called her horse because she looks like one in those dresses her father makes her wear.” Without flinching he met Frigga’s eyes as he said this, and his mother, seeing the truth of it, believed him. She sighed again and petted his slicked-back hair, smoothing a bit of recalcitrant curl out of it.

“Oh, Loki,” said Frigga, “what am I to do with you? I wish you’d be friends with Sif like Thor is,” and Thor looked up from the game of phantom swords he played with his shadow.

“What?” said Thor. He’d turned from his game though he still played at it. Swinging widely without looking, he banged his hand on the wall and then swore.

“Thor!” said Frigga, and Loki was safe for the time being. 

He didn’t tell Frigga about the peach. He’d eaten it too, with Sif on top of him and her mouth so very bright in the afternoon sun. He’d eaten more of it than Sif. Sif would tell, he thought, but fear of discovery wasn’t what stuck in his mouth. 

Loki remembered those three bites of fruit for a very long time. That first night after he’d eaten the peach, he laid awake in bed for hours, thinking of Sif’s mouth falling open as she gasped and how the fruit had all but burst on his tongue and of the leaves and the shadows they made on Sif’s skin, and of her coltish legs on either side of his waist and her skirt rucked up her thighs. He stayed up all night, thinking of it.


End file.
